I know that the art department there for WoW is working to update all the character models for Warlords of Destruction.... I mean Draenor. (This is what I get for listening to Koltrane on CTR). With the greater detail to the character models, there is expected to be an increased demand on the graphic performance of the computer. My question is, do you have any idea at this time what that demand is going to be? I have signed up for Beta and my computer specs are listed there, but I also know that I get lag in raids and high graphic environments, like flying through heavily colored areas. My computer is a little over a year old, I purchased it because the laptop was not able to run Mists, and this computer was doing fine until SoO raid tier with the graphics demand. I am trying to figure out what is going to be needed for my computer, be it an upgrade on some hardware or a whole new CPU.

My question is, do you have any idea at this time what that demand is going to be? I have signed up for Beta and my computer specs are listed there, but I also know that I get lag in raids and high graphic environments, like flying through heavily colored areas.

We don't, and we tend not to have updated system requirements/recommendations until most content is in, most big changes and engineering are done, and we're looking like there isn't going to be anything else that would greatly affect performance. So we won't really know absolutely until some point through the beta. We're keenly aware of the system requirements the new character models may require, and how that could impact client performance. No further details yet on how they'll be supported on lower end systems, if at all.

Fun fact, the game still supports processors and graphics cards that were released over 8 years ago. To put that in other terms, modern day systems are in some cases 50x more powerful than the lowest end systems the game still supports. Moving us forward graphically in such a dramatic way with the new models is going to require a lot of testing, tweaking, optimizing, and determination of what we can realistically support going forward, but we just don't know what that will look like yet.